Follow me

One of the things I want to do sometimes is to repost stuff from Printculture’s archives, because it tends to be hard to find. Here is a series of discussions on the topic of something I called “leverage,” by which I meant, as Mark McGurl pointed out in the comments, “critical distance.” The conversation that ensues sees the two of us thinking through and explaining some of the things that motivated The Program Era and The Hypothetical Mandarin. The entire conversation series of posts (which are combined below) dates from October 2007. I will also say that one of the weird things about rereading this stuff is realizing how old some of my ideas are; I swear I’ve repeated some of the things I say below in the last couple of years as though they’d just occurred to me.

Leverage as a function of critical capability and interest

It occurred to me the other day — and in fact I may have already bored one or two Printculture readers with this — that it would be useful to think about why so much academic work on contemporary material isn’t very good. But perhaps the premises bear repeating: (1) a higher percentage of literary critical or cultural analysis of contemporary material — fiction, poetry, film, the culture in general — says, by my standards, completely predictable things (than does work on material removed from us in time) and (2) is therefore no good. I have no data to back the first part of this up; it’s merely an impression. For the movement from the first to the second premise, I rely on my belief that literary critical analysis should, in general, aim to teach us things we don’t already know about the world.

The question I’m setting out to answer here is why this is true. Why, that is, does work on contemporary material so often simply tell me what I (feel like I) already know.

The answer has to do, I think, with leverage. By leverage I mean to indicate the degree to which my ability to tell you something about X that X doesn’t already know about itself and isn’t obviously saying to anyone who’s paying attention, depends to a very large extent on the difference I am able to generate between myself, and what I know or see, and what X knows or sees on its own.

Leverage as I understand it is therefore largely a function of what one knows, and the greater the gap between what one knows and what the object knows, the more leverage one has, and the more likely one is able to be to say something that the object does not already say on its own. This does not in and of itself guarantee that one will produce interesting scholarship, but it helps.

So, for instance, if I want to write about Jane Austen, one of the things I have that Jane Austen didn’t have is a broad sense of how the history of marriage functions. Austen may have been talking about marriage, but she didn’t think in quite the way I do — having not read, say Foucault or Hayden White or Judith Butler — about either history (and its relation to novels) or about gender. I can thus bring an enormous leverage to bear on any given Austen novel, and use that leverage to understand meta-cognitively, in a way that the novel itself could not, the operations of the novel’s arrangement of its characters, the relations it proposes between them, and indeed the attitude it takes (or its narrator takes) towards those relations. Having read, say, the narratological work of Genette or Woloch, I also have a more structural and historical sense than Austen did of the workings and history of fiction — from this position I can therefore likewise use my leverage to make the text do a kind of work that it is both capable of doing and unaware of doing.

That’s what I mean by leverage. And in this example you see how easily one can develop leverage in relation to the past. Indeed, the further past the better, though of course in any one of these cases one would do well, also, to refine the mode of one’s leverage by having a good sense of what in fact the cultural object did know. This is why one has more leverage on Austen than one does on, say, Sappho, about whose life and history so little is known. That absence of knowledge effectively undermines the possibility of critical leverage, since the distance between the cultural object and the critic depends on being able to locate both those points as coherently in space as one can.

The other way to develop leverage is through radical differences in knowledge. If I want to do a reading of, say, the cultural meaning or value of Jake Gyllenhall, I can rely on the fact that I know (I imagine) a lot more than he does about, say, the history of celebrity, the development of the Hollywood star system, queer theory, and so on. This means that I can quite easily get a better sense of how Gyllenhall functions — and indeed what he means — in contemporary culture than he does. Things are different with, say, Madonna, an artist who’s well aware of at least some of what I know about queer theory, the star system, and so on, and who in fact integrates that knowledge into her public performances and being, often in quite explicit ways.

Notice that having critical leverage does not necessarily mean that one does good work. That there seems to be more bad work done on contemporary culture results, I think, from the fact that when one’s advantages are clear, the stakes are higher, and the obligation to say something new is actually more intense. That’s because a casual application of cultural theory to any one piece of pop culture will generate, without much effort, a lot of material: that television sitcoms reinforce heterosexist norms is, for instance, something more or less everyone on the academic left already knows, so you’re not going to get a lot of leverage out of pointing out that this year’s new sitcom does just that. Indeed, one might say that good critical work comes from producing new knowledge above and beyond what a casual application of leveragewill do for your community of peers.

Take for instance the idea of writing something about the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, which someone I knew once proposed to me. That’s an ok idea, I said, but you’re going to have to say something about it that I can’t think of in the next 30 seconds. At this point, that cuts out saying that it’s sexist, and that it seems sexist but is actually radical… which leaves you with some work to do. So, paradoxically, you can have such a thing as too much leverage: a condition I would define as having so much leverage (as in the relation between the critique of sexism and the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue) that the effort required to produce knowledge becomes trivial, so minimal that anyone can do it.

(Note that this critique applies equally to certain kinds of historical work, but it seems more prevalent with contemporary work, perhaps because with historical material there is at least, in many cases, the shock of discovery. But it may also be that the past has an auratic quality resulting from an aristocratic-academic prejudice against the new; it may also be that, given how much more likely it is that a contemporary audience knows enough about sitcoms or Jake Gyllenhall to make the trivial leap to judgment, the simple fact that most people know less about the past than the present explains this difference.)

This brings us, finally, to two problems: the problem of contemporary fiction, and the problem of critical history’s effect on criticism. But, having run out of time, I will have to take both of these up sometime in the next couple days, when I’ll talk about why I think contemporary highbrow fiction is among the most difficult subjects for scholars to tackle, and say that the answer has to do, once again, with the concept of leverage I’ve developed here; after which I’ll address the question of why it may be, paradoxically, easier to write the 3000th article on James Joyce than the very first one on Jake Gyllenhall. Meanwhile I’m eager for comments and revisions, if you have them…

Leverage Part 2

In the comments BabyKong anticipates much of what I was going to say next, perhaps because, like his/her older sibling Donkey Kong (or perhaps, since I am not fully up-to-date on the Kong family tree, the nimbler Donkey Kong Jr.), he specializes in reacting to the moves of slightly over-adventursome Italian plumbers like myself. What follows is — with the exception of my explanation of why it’s easier to write the 3000th article on Joyce than the first one on Jake Gyllenhall (or whoever–I’m not even sure I’m spelling his name right, but I think his appearance in the recent SNL love song for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad [whose name I did bother looking up] has really got him on my mind) — thus more or less a response to the girder-shattering stomps of BabyKong’s intrepid comments. To wit:

BabyKong writes:

I wonder: what is the relation between your idea of “leverage” and the more or less traditional idea of “critical distance.”

I would like to say that there’s a huge difference here, but I’m afraid there isn’t. This makes me feel sad. Perhaps I’m simply reinventing the wheel. Let’s see what happens as I go.

I wonder also whether and to what degree you need to introduce the concept of reflexivity into your discussion? Many contemporary writers have read theory, or at least have internalized a hearsay version thereof. That’s why criticism on contemporary fiction has such trouble saying anything interesting about it.

See, on this general topic, Sianne Ngai’s chapter “Bad Timing” in her book Ugly Feelings.

Yep. What BabyKong says in the second paragraph above is exactly where I was going with this. If you argue that Pynchon’s writing creates a postmodern world full of signifiers without signifieds, or that Coetzee undermines Enlightenment theories of the human, then you really aren’t saying anything that Pynchon and Coetzee aren’t (in some general sense) trying to say, largely because, as BabyKong notes, most highbrow and even middlebrow contemporary writers have internalized some version of theory.

BabyKong continues:

Thus, in my opinion, the best way to gain “leverage” on contemporary writing is to be (in a sense) less “knowing” than it is, eschewing a shared experience of the dizzying postmodernism of it all in favor of pointing out obvious but unsexy things like the institutional position of contemporary writers and contemporary writing. In and around the school, where most of these writers now work, “reflexivity” circulates as one value among others. Thus, I’m not sure I can accept your premise about the badness of work on contemporary culture: I think what you are describing is the badness of poststructuralist accounts of contemporary culture, which are condemned to a boring redundancy of reflexivity.

Accounts premised on a specialized knowledge of institutions, economics, etc., will by contrast have a good chance of saying something interesting about contemporary culture, perhaps even about the Swimsuit Issue.

I guess I’ll say this, just briefly, before moving on to the interesting bits: my claim that a lot of work on contemporary culture is bad rests on the fact that I think a lot of work hasn’t understood the basic principles laid out in BabyKong’s response. In the past two weeks I’ve reviewed a couple documents that seem to confirm this. I wouldn’t even necessarily claim that these accounts are “poststructuralist,” because in some sense they’ve internalized the same vague theory that many of the writers they’re writing about have, and so it’s not a case of a hard-edged and critical poststructuralism encountering a vague or poorly understood version of it, but rather a vague and fairly untheorized and unhistoricized version of poststructuralism (that is, a version to which poststructuralism itself has not been applied) encountering a smarter and more elaborated version of itself. (That’s not to say that well-researched and carefully considered postructuralism doesn’t produce this kind of criticism, but that at least in the couple things I’ve been reading lately even that doesn’t seem to be happening.)

And so if work on the contemporary is more bad than other work, it is because the contemporary produces two kinds of pitfalls that we critics have not sufficiently been warned against: (1) the pitfall of too much critical leverage (explained by me last time), and (2) the “poststructuralist” problem BabyKong outlines above, which applies equally well to criticism of poetry as it does to fiction (do we really need to hear that another L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet has destablized the ontologies of meaningfulness?).

Other kinds of work is, presumably, the subject of different kinds of pitfalls (for instance the tendency to turn a small and relatively broken-off piece of the past into an allegory of its era [when done well = Benjamin; when done badly = terrible; where terrible != Benjamin for the most part]; all the historical tendencies Ranciere identifies in his critique of the Annales school, etc.). But these are the subject of another discussion, or someone else’s discussion.

All that said, let’s now head back to BabyKong’s final paragraph, which I repeat here:

Accounts premised on a specialized knowledge of institutions, economics, etc., will by contrast have a good chance of saying something interesting about contemporary culture, perhaps even about the Swimsuit Issue.

I think this is right, especially as it reminds me very much of the work of someone I know (whose name rhymes with Dady Bong), work that has taught me a great deal about the potential effectiveness of such an approach. I do wonder if this work is, as BabyKong suggests, deliberately “less knowing” than the work it writes about; it seems to me instead to be a question of being “differently knowing,” of bringing to bear on the work a mode of thought (“systems theory,” say) and/or field of knowledge (institutions, economics, etc.) that it itself has not accounted for (despite all its vaunted “reflexivity”). Indeed, this critical maneuver seems to illustrate the value of critical maneuvers par excellence, since it depends rather precisely on recognizing (one of the) central features of the recently contemporary as a mode of postmodern reflexivity that can itself be the subject of history (when thought of outside the already reflexive optic of much of contemporary literary critical work).

This is as much as to say that one of the major problems of work on the contemporary is that it has failed to recognize that it shared with the contemporary (and especially with highbrow art in all genres) too many fundamental epistemological and social assumptions, and thus that it tends to be unable to generate critical distance (aka “leverage”) on that work, thereby reducing it to simply repeating what that work already knows. But now I’m telling BabyKong something I at least partially learned from reading his work in the first place.

Long parenthesis: How different this moment is, then, from the moment when French poststructuralists discovered (or invented) their critique of language in the work of literary modernists like Joyce or Celine, an era when the “theory” seemed refreshingly belated when compared to the artwork. In the past ten or fifteen years it has seemed that criticism was instead ahead of the work of art, or perhaps that criticism had to pretend to be slightly behind it in order to pretend to discover in it the thing that criticism already knew. Only now with the death of theory (or whatever you want to call it) is this becoming widely visible — though the structural blindness of a certain mode of this kind of criticism was perhaps visible to some people all along. (This does not mean, for me at least, that the critics of theory were always right; one can elevate, as Sartre suggested, one’s anti-anti-communism ahead of one’s anti-communism without fully abandoning the latter position.) End of long parenthesis.

In any case, if the way to do good work on the contemporary is by shifting the field of analysis to one not already anticipated in the contemporary itself, this is tantamount to articulating once again the particular case of a general truth, which is that good critical knowledge proceeds invariably through the friction wrought by the presence in a single space of two paradigms, the first the one of the text, and the second the one of the critic. In a perfect world, I’d say, there should be just as good a chance that the former will teach the latter something as the reverse, but I suppose that one of the bad habits of contemporary criticism (in all fields) has been a kind of false genuflection before the object, in which the fact of critical projection (that is, the discovery in the object of the thing you were looking for all along, and indeed perhaps the only thing you were capable of finding) was concealed by the claim, made over and over, that this (whatever it was: usually poststructuralism) was what the object was teaching us, as though for the first time.

… And now once again no time to say why it’s harder to write on Gyllenhall than Joyce. Next time, unless, as is my secret hope, BabyKong does it all for me.

Leverage Part 3

Somehow it’s easier to deal with long comments in this format for me, mainly because I can break things down into pieces. So.

Babykong writes:

Do you think there is a connection between what you are saying the the oft-heard idea that “there is nothing truly exciting going on” in literary and cultural criticism these days? I guess the first question would be: Do people still say that, or has the rise of the globalism thing, the science and literature thing, et al, quieted that gloomy sentiment? Is our disclipline more intellectually confident now than it was, say, five years ago?

Or are the rise the globalism thing and the science and lit thing two different symptoms of a continuing anxiety about our possible irrelevance?

My sense is that yes, people do still say that, and that part of the reason they say it is because it’s true. A lot of the globalization stuff coming out of the humanities seems to me almost entirely predictable. And even in my own latest book I feel like the advance I’m making depends for its impact on the illustration of a particular mode of labor (i.e., mine) and the working out of some very specific historical activity (that actually occurred in the world) than on the more general claim that universal ideals coming out of the Enlightenment depend rather intensely on a relation to otherness — which is something everyone knows, and something that bad readers of my work will agree with and recommend that I say even more explicitly. (I might say that the difference between my work and the work of others in this space is that I am most interested in material that has an especially interesting relation to self-consciousness and reflexivity, material that quite explicitly privileges a particular subject (in my case, China), and knows it, while being completely uninterested in (n.b. not “unable” to) allowing that subject to interfere with the conclusions it draws; thus I attempt to avoid the “gotcha” move that occurs when one simply applies a fairly facile form of leverage to historical texts, because in fact I am not interested in the “unconscious” of the text but rather in some kind of intermediary form of awareness and reflection that I generally do not read in Freudian terms (since I don’t think that history has an unconscious). I’m interested, that is, in “less knowing” forms of history than in more knowing ones. But that’s another story.)

So back to the contemporary moment in criticism. I would say that one of the things that “theory” seemed to teach people was that the best way to do criticism was either (1) to read some French person and apply his/her work to literature before everyone else did, or (2) to find in the realm of another discipline a new method — a heuristic for finding new objects, and a hermeneutic for interpreting them, or (3) to find some new set of objects to which an already established hermeneutic had not yet been applied.

These three methods cannot easily be separated, and indeed (1) is merely the local expression of the more general habit of (2), which tended in the 70s and 80s to appear through French philosophy. But one only has to think of New Historicism, which follows rule (2) without following rule (1), to see that it’s the more general case. As for (3), I will say that the recent rise (and now decline?) of work on animals is a classic example of the genre, one that emerged significantly through a the confluence between (1), via Derrida, and (2), via the work of people like Peter Singer and Martha Nussbaum.

(As I write this the Denver Broncos just gave up a 45-yard play on 2nd and 33 to the San Diego Chargers, this while playing at home and losing 20-3. Sigh.)

I would say that in the contemporary academy the work of Franco Moretti is a good example of the application of rule (2) above, as is the use of systems theory and economics. The hostility directed towards these methods thus has little to do with their strategy for creating leverage (which is classic) but rather with the move towards the social sciences, whose relation to the humanities has long seemed antagonistic. That the social sciences themselves continue to divide ever more sharply between those whose work depends on statistical analysis and those who read theory (so that you have “hard” sociologists and “soft” sociologists, who can barely communicate with each other, but can have productive discussions with economists and literary scholars, respectively) suggests that what is happening is perhaps a much larger re-division of the field of knowledge in and through the disciplines, so that what had seemed originally to be a fissure operating at the level of the institutional College (the College of Liberal Arts vs. the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences) or the institutional department (economics vs. sociology) now seems to have penetrated down into departments themselves, provoking a situation that could only perhaps be resolved by an entire redistribution of the professoriate as such. The results would be damaging, because it’s better for us to be challenged by each other, and for different hermeneutics to operate on the same or similar objects. But when I hear (as I have) someone seriously claim that Moretti doesn’t belong in an English department I hear the echoing of our lesser, stupider demons.

More banally, I suppose, the rise of interest in “globalization” feels more like problem (3) above than problem (2): simply the application to a new field of play of hermeneutics whose answers are fairly predictable, in which the hegemonic and the resistant are arrayed along lines whose vectors have been, since the early days of postcolonial theory, thoroughly familiar. This even down to the continuing appearance of the Marxist pox-on-both-your-bourgeois-houses critique, where, in the case of the field of “cosmopolitanism,” for instance, the role previously played by Aijaz Ahmad or Arif Dirlik is taken on (well, I should add) by Timothy Brennan.

It’s clear, in any case, that globalization is a “problem,” not a “method,” and is thus unlikely I think to produce any especially “new.” Indeed I would say that the literary academy’s lack of faith in itself comes largely from the fact that it has not been able to generate new methods, only new problems, for a while now, and from a general tendency to privilege the former over the latter in terms of intellectual prestige. (Even the transnational turn in American studies, so widely announced, is simply the arrival of more material on which to do the same kinds of criticism that we’ve been doing; and all the work on “things” is of, I’m afraid, the same order–unless Bill Brown’s almost-radical simultaneous performance of critical modesty and chutzpah constitutes a methodological approach, which, though I admire it, I’m not sure it does.)

If our discipline lacks intellectual confidence, which I think it does, it has as much to do with the fact that no substantially new methods promising socio-political “relevance” have in fact emerged in the last ten years or so. Criticism’s newest objects (transnationalism, globalization) might be thought of as temporary substitutes for relevance, since their quite obvious relevance to the field of politics allows them to function as prosthetics in the search for a new method. Or, one might say, as ways to avoid coming to terms with the fact that new methods, if and when they have appeared, may in fact not be “relevant” in quite the same political ways (I take this to be one source of people’s “problem” with Moretti).

If, faced with this stuff, people feel like there’s nothing exciting going on in literary criticism, or experience a lack of disciplinary self-confidence, this may have ultimately to do more with the larger operation of the relation between “method” and “problem” than anything else. Or perhaps with the way that the problem of “relevance” works across those two other nodes.

That said, I feel like I have plenty left to say, with more book and article ideas than I have time for. And most people I know and respect feel that way. So perhaps the problem is one of perception rather than actuality, and perhaps in fact I (and all those other people) have resolved our relation to the question of “relevance” and “method” in ways that do not cripple us but inspire and motivate us. It would be interesting to find out what we thought those resolutions were, and to wonder why, when so many people agree that the discipline itself lacks self-confidence, energy, and direction, there’s far more good work being done — even by people I actually have met in person — than there is time for me to read it.

All this best left for another time, however. But two last thoughts in relation to Babykong’s comment:

I think we should recognize that there might be places (like the classroom) where the overfamiliar truths of feminism are still worth uttering– we might feel differently about these now all too obvious truths.

Amen. The classroom is a totally different space. The problem with relevance is never clearer than in that space. It’s actually a mark of the discipline’s relation to teaching that it can’t be satisfied with its intense relevance in that extraordinarily public location (we’ve all had teachers who changed our lives, but more importantly, we’ve all been those teachers for our students, even ones who didn’t go on to graduate school).

Indeed, I think it’s part of a foolish academic self-loathing that so many of us spend all our time worrying about our “relevance” to politicians and other “public” people when in fact teachers at every level have more access, and more intense access, to members of the public than any other publically-funded person in this country. Rather than blame ourselves for being so irrelevant, we might point out that most of us could be making twice or three times what we currently make had we gone to law or medical school, and marvel at the way in which any teacher has engaged in a profoundly complex economization of vocational joy that speaks to a desire to be relevant to other people — no matter how unimportant, in political terms, those people turn out to be. Even the “relevance” that we have in relation to a student whose life we’ve “changed” is temporary and limited, but it’s nonetheless far more than nothing, and worthy of praise.

But speaking for myself, I do typically find this more interesting than routinized poststructuralism, because it at least offers us new data and new objects– new “stuff” that is– to think about.

I think that’s right, though the fact that we’re arguing about whether “routinzed” poststructuralism is worse than “routinzed” historicism or not feels like an argument about which carbohydrate-free bread tastes better. I would say, however, that part of the problem with routinzed poststructuralism has been that it’s been so unadventurous about its objects. And that — to refer again to some of my current work, which I know leaves some readers out — that what I was trying to do there was to see if I could combine certain kinds of poststructuralist modes of reading with certain kinds of historical work, in the hope that the latter’s ability to produce new knowledge would be revitalized, and altered, by its application to a new set of objects — that the thing wouldn’t be to say, “see, you can do historicist poststructuralism,” but rather to suggest that a classically poststructuralist critique might find itself transformed into something “new” (or newish) and exciting through its interaction with a different kind of object. That the object might rework the method, one might say.

Come to think of it, this may be one of the hopes for all that work on globalization. Since I’m teaching a whole course on the latter next semester, I have some thinking to do…

Nice article from NY Mag on the psychological and physiological adjustments that come with having lost large amounts of weight.

Cultural fantasies of weight loss present a tidy, attractive proposition – lose weight, gain self-acceptance – without addressing the whole truth: that body image post-weight loss is often quite complicated. Perhaps that helps explain why the rate of recidivism among people who have lost significant amounts of weight is shockingly high – by some estimates, more than 90 percent of people who lose a lot of weight will gain it back. Of course, there are lots of other reasons: genetic predisposition towards obesity, for one. For another, someone who’s lost 100 pounds to get to 140 pounds will need to work harder – including eating much less each day – to maintain that weight than someone who’s been at it her entire life. (Tara Parker-Pope’s excellent piece “The Fat Trap” explains these physiological factors in much greater detail.) But what about the psychological? Who would be surprised if a person – contending with both a new body that looks different from the one she feels she was promised, and the loneliness of feeling there’s no way to express that disappointment – returned to the familiar comfort of overeating? At least its effects are predictable.

Two thoughts: first that the last bit is of a piece toward a more general understanding of how psychologically difficult deprivation is, and how things like being fat or being poor change the wiring of our bodies and our brains. Beginning from that understanding makes compassion for the choices others make far easier (and moralizing judgment oriented around disgust more difficult).

Second is that Iwonder if anyone’s ever done a comparative analysis of the disappointment one feels after losing a great deal of weight and the post-pregnancy/childbirth body. Both are situations in which one does not return (unless one is a certain sort of celebrity, I suppose) to the status quo ante; in the case of weight loss this is exacerbated or made more weird, of course, by the fact that the new status quo may never have been ante. I was 6’1″, 215 pounds at age 16, 6’3″ 240 at 18, and 6’3″ 278 in summer 2002. Since 2007 I’ve bounced between 190 and 200 (I was at 184 at one point, but never again) and I’m still not used to it.

So a few months ago I predicted that one day actors would be hired by firms like Coursera to teach MOOCs (because once you don’t have to respond to student questions live, who cares who reads from the script? Might as well be a hottie…).

Casting Damon in a MOOC is just an idea, for now: In meetings, officials have proposed trying one run of a course with someone like Damon, to see how it goes. But even to consider swapping in a star actor for a professor reveals how much these free online courses are becoming major media productions—ones that may radically change the traditional role of professors.

One for-profit MOOC producer, Udacity, already brings in camera-friendly staff members to appear with professors in lecture videos. One example is an introduction to psychology course developed earlier this year in partnership with San Jose State University. It had three instructors: Gregory J. Feist, an associate professor of psychology at San Jose State University, who has been teaching for more than 25 years and who wrote a popular textbook on the subject; Susan Snycerski, a lecturer at the university who has taught for 15 years; and Lauren Castellano, a Udacity employee who recently finished a master’s in psychology from the university, advised by Feist.

I’m in Seoul for the annual conference of the English Language and Literature Association of Korea, for which I’m one of many interesting keynote speakers (including Ira Nadel, who I started reading in graduate school but had never met, so that’s kind of a thrill).

Talk is on “Scale, Data, and the Problem of World Literature,” and draws from an article I’m hoping to finish this year. Slides are here for your amusement.

I suppose by “strange” I mean that his politics (if you look at his blog) operate from a position that imagines itself as entirely apolitical but is nonetheless quite interested in politics. So it produces frequent pox-on-both-houses language, but also pragmatic suggestions for various kinds of things (including online ed, in the link above) with no real concern for what I think of as the “normal” language of American politics (involving concepts like the moral, the just, and so on).

And then you ask yourself — well, who would Dilbert vote for? — and you realize that Adams’s politics are perfectly in tune with the strip, because the answer is totally unknowable. Even the grounds on which Dilbert might vote for someone are unknowable.

At least according to this reading of a Chronicle story by Chris Newfield. Short version that both faculty and university presidents agree that MOOCs will have a negative impact on higher ed, and that this opinion is held by people who nonetheless seem open to technological innovation and other kinds of innovation in teaching (so it’s not just a thoughtless resistance to change).

And yet, the problem is that for about 18 months state legislatures were allowed to pretend (or pretended to pretend) that the MOOC would allow for further cutting of state support for higher education…

In other words, when universities lose MOOCs as a budget solution, they lose the main source of hope that state politicians had for a free fix of the college cost problem for a less affluent, not wonderfully educated younger generation. MOOCs were the austerity solution to the mass quality problem. Without them, tempers will flare, fingers will point, and funding will not be restored. In the meantime, faculty are going to have to lead higher ed innovation anyway, and the good news is that post-MOOC-as-cure-all faculty don’t need to focus on the technology to the exclusion of the “human side” of teaching and learning.

Now that the MOOC seems to be a non-viable solution, we can look forward to the rapid restoration of that missing funding.

Talk coming up to students at Jacobs University, Bremen, “Modernity and the Ends of Europe.” Designed more or less to convince a group of smart undergraduates, many thinking of majoring in a program called “global humanities,” to get excited about the big ideas governing concepts like the humanities and the global.

Draft version of slides here; final version was too big to upload but you get the idea.

Those of you who know me and my family know that our son, Jules, was born with a very rare genetic disability (known as 9p deletion syndrome). He’s fine, at least medically, though it was no fun for the first three weeks of his life and has on various occasions been a little less fun than it otherwise might have been (cleft palate surgery, some ongoing concerns, now faded, about his heart). Cognitively, we know less about the future than we might, partly because the syndrome is so rare (maybe 150 cases in the United States), partly because it produces such a wide range of outcomes, and partly because the treatment of the disabled has changed so radically in the United States in the last 60 years that evidence gathered on the basis of a 30-, 40-, or 50-year-old 9p deletion person does you little to no good, since that person lived through a radically different set of approaches to disability than will any child born ten or twenty or thirty years later.

I know less than I should about how disabled people are treated in the United States. More than I used to know, of course, before Jules was born, before he spent 2.5 of his first 3 years in an amazing day care facility, in which he was fully integrated with the other kids (a process known as “mainstreaming,” now the normal thing to do in the United States), and to which state-provided therapists (occupational, physical, speech, developmental) showed up for 7 hours a week to help Jules catch up with his peers.

The idea behind mainstreaming and the therapy (which is known generally as “early intervention”) is simple and twofold: first, that the earlier you can work with disabled (or even potentially disabled) children, the better you can help them reach their maximum genetic potential (I know that’s a fuzzy concept, but let’s use it loosely here to express something like the maximal cognitive capacity someone can reach, all other things being equal); and, second, that surrounding (potentially) disabled children with other children who are developmentally “ahead” of them actually encourages the (potentially) disabled children to rise to the level of their peers. In this mainstreaming takes advantage of two well-established developmental facts: that early and frequent intervention produces better developmental outcomes, and that peer effects are powerful social, physical, and cognitive motivators (for good and ill–just ask someone who chooses to live in a frat house).

So by the summer of 2013 Jules barely qualified to continue in the state-provided program that provided the 7 hours of extra attention per week that he had been getting since he was four months old. He had made amazing progress, and was catching up to his peers on a number of levels that the state measures to determine eligiblity for its programs (gross motor, fine motor, speech, social/psychological maturity, etc.). But we were thrilled that he was qualified because we knew that the more help he got, the better off he’d be in the long run. (None of this stuff means he’ll stay caught up with his peers, which is why this early intervention is so important.)

And then we decided to move to Germany for the academic year.

So on the face of things the law in Germany and the EU more general is very good about disabled folks. But the reality on the ground is a bit more complicated.

The first problem has to do with the fact that, because I would be on a Fulbright, I wouldn’t be paying taxes in Germany. Not paying taxes (and not being a permanent resident, etc.) means that I would be ineligible for state-sponsored health insurance, which meant in turn that Jules would have no access to the various forms of early intervention that apply in Germany. Furthermore, since his deletion was considered a pre-existing condition, early intervention wouldn’t be covered either the insurance provided to me by Fulbright, or by my US, Penn-State-based health insurance company (in the latter case this seems reasonable since they are relying on the state to handle this). What help there is for non-tax-paying EU citizens (for yes, I am an EU citizen) in the state of Baden-Württemberg, it is pegged to income, and our income would not make us eligible for the 400 Euros a month that are apparently on offer.

But none of this gets to the core of the real problem, which is that in Germany the mainstreaming movement is about 20 years behind where it was in the United States. And this became clear only when we enrolled Jules in the “international” kindergarten belonging to Heidelberg’s Deutsch-Amerkanisches Institut.

To be fair: I did not disclose Jules’s disability when I applied for him (and his sister) to enroll in the school. I had planned to discuss it with the school principal when I got here and she could see Jules; I was worried otherwise that the word “disability” would scare the school away from admitting him. (This would have been illegal, of course, but… who wants to get involved in a lawsuit in a foreign country where you don’t speak the language that well, and are only planning on being there for a year?) My sister told me she thought this was dishonest. I’m not sure.

In any case Jules would be enrolled for three weeks in the DAI’s summer camp before school started; I figured that would give the school plenty of time to figure things out, and for us to meet. But as it turned out the counselors at the summer camp were college kids, who were great with Jules, and in fact never reported having anything wrong. They accommodated him by bringing our stroller along on long walks, since his low muscle tone has made him a late and easily tireable walker. But otherwise all was fine. I ran into the principal on the street and she promised she’d email me to get together the following week so I figured I’d tell her then. Also, her son was a camp counselor and I imagined he’d be reporting on both kids.

I never met the principal, because she put out her back. I finally wrote her about three or four days before school started to tell her about Jules, and saying that if it turned out the school needed any support from the city of Heidelberg I’d be happy to help. She never responded (later she said she wasn’t really comfortable writing emails in English).

Then the first day of school came. About two hours into the day, we got a call: Jules had diarrhea. Could we come get him? So we did. Per school rules we were to keep him home the next day as well to allow things to clear. But when we showed up to school the next day things were weird: the two teachers in charge of Jules’s classroom spoke to us about the fact that they though Jules might need extra help. Both my wife and I felt like they were in some weird way blaming us for his diarrhea, accusing us of somehow being dishonest with them about it. Two days later the principal talked to me after school and asked about the disability; she said the teachers were concerned that they couldn’t adequately care for Jules; they thought they needed some extra assistance in the classroom. I said we would be happy to do anything we could to help make that possible; she said she would contact the city.

I don’t really know who to talk to, she said. I haven’t had to call them in 30 years that I’ve been teaching.

That’s probably when we should have realized that things weren’t going to go well.

But at the time we figured that at some level the teachers’ discomfort came mainly from the fact that he’d had diarrhea on that first day. And so they thought that his disability was that he would have diarrhea constantly. (Thankfully, it’s not.) So we were a bit dismissive of their concerns–thinking that they’d overreacted, that once they got to know him things would be fine. And we were right, to a point.

The ensuing days went much better, partly as the teachers adjusted to the fact that Jules pooped like everyone else. (He’s not potty trained, but neither were at least two other 3-year-olds in his class.) Nonetheless they kept expressing discomfort and concern, usually framed in terms of being worried about their ability to give him the attention they were saying he needed. This involved suggesting on occasion that we might want to start picking him up at 3pm instead of 5pm; that they were very concerned that when the number of students in the class increased (from 6 to 12, as it has) they would not be able to include Jules; that not being able to keep up with his peers would damage Jules psychologically.

All these are perhaps legitimate concerns, but, coming from a situation in which not a single one of them had ever been raised–where in fact the teachers and the administration of our daycare in the US had assured us up front that they would be able to meet Jules’s needs, and then had not only done that but had shown us how to be better parents, and had worked directly with specialists in order to become better caregivers for Jules–they hit us like a ton of bricks. We experienced them as expressions of unfamiliarity and hostility towards our son, and, more broadly, felt like the real problem was that Jules was different enough from the other children that he was somehow violating the normal expected range of abilities and behaviors with which the teachers felt they could cope.

Around this time I began talking about these issues with my mother, who has taught and been the head of a number of schools in the US and abroad for the past 35 years. She told me that when I was three and four, she had similar problems with the teachers at the French daycare I attended. I wasn’t disabled; just rambunctious, and probably (if later life is any guide) fairly obnoxious. But more to the point, my mother said, I wasn’t quite French enough–I wasn’t socialized to the more normative expectations for the behavior of French children. This felt like an awfully familiar story; what my mother and I encountered, some forty years apart, was the awkward integration of a child marked by difference (and Jules is American, too) into a culture that tends more strongly to value social and behavioral similarity. Jules’s differences weren’t just inconvenient; they were, in some sense, anti-social.

That is why, I suppose, until recently most disabled children in Germany were put into Sonderschule, special schools; in fact many of them still are, and our principal suggested that we might consider this as an option while realizing, I think, that there was no way in hell we would do so. It explains also, perhaps, why a friend of mine, hearing my story, remembered a proposal in Austria to put all non-German speaking kids in special classrooms… at which point, being surrounded by other German speakers, they what? Wouldn’t learn German, I guess. Then you could complain that the immigrants were failing to integrate themselves into society.

You can get pretty quickly from this kind of rough analysis of cultural difference–based, I want to point out, on one example, about which I’ll have more to say in a bit–to an easy iteration of Godwin’s law. I confess that at one especially angry moment I did contemplate mentioning to the principal the resemblance between Sonderschule and the camps. At some level it’s more complicated than that. At another–especially given three decades of research showing that special institutions seriously damage liftetime outcomes (cognitive and physical) for disabled people in them, it isn’t. Putting people in Sonderschule is in many cases the equivalent of throwing them into a social garbage can. That later in life such folks are heavily supported with state funds doesn’t improve the situation.

But back to Jules. A couple weeks later, on the occasion of the first Parent-Teacher night, I met again with the principal. We really need to do something about Jules, she said. We would like to have someone there for him at least 2-3 hours a day (this later went down to 3 days a week). Have you called the city office? Yes, she said. They offer a maximum of 400 Euros a month in support, means-tested. But a trained instructor costs 58 Euros an hour. So even if we had been eligible for support, we were looking at a cost of some 2000 Euros a month to put Jules into a situation in which the school would feel comfortable. No wonder that, faced with this kind of situation, even mildly disabled kids end up in Sonderschule. (Two weeks later, after we’d already decided to withdraw Jules from the school and had discovered alternative arrangements, I found out from Jules’s speech therapist that a German-language kindergarten about 20 minutes from here does in fact integrate disabled children into its classes. So there may be alternatives; you just have to be here long enough to find them. Given the Fulbright situation and my language abilities, that was not possible this time around.)

The way we left it with the principal was that she would call the city office again and see what she could do. We all expressed goodwill and enthusiasm and went home. But I felt like the message was awfully clear: the school was trying to get us to take Jules out. They couldn’t say so, since it would be illegal to do so. But we were being told that they couldn’t care for him.

That same day I had run into one of Jules’s teachers. He did really well today, she told me. All the kids were in a circle singing a song and he actually came in and joined everyone! She seemed really happy. I felt good for about 5 minutes, and then I realized that this story meant that all the other times the kids had sung together Jules had somehow not been included in the circle. What the hell was he doing then?

It’s hard to regain trust in teachers, or a school, when you’ve lost it. Short of putting a camera in the classroom I had no way of knowing what was happening to Jules on an average day. And my wife and I no longer felt like we trusted these folks. We knew they were inexperienced in dealing with disabled kids (though again, Jules is not very disabled by US standards). But it’s one thing to be ignorant–you can fix that. It’s another to take your ignorance and inexperience and turn it into a series of rationalizations that justify it. It was clear that the school felt that this was Jules’s problem (or ours), not theirs. That is, that this was a result of his disability (and the dishonest way in which we’d concealed it) rather than of their lack of imagination as teachers. None of our American teachers have had this problem, which is among other things quite obviously a matter of training and experience. But the DAI teachers and principal did not seem willing to acquire it. At this point they’ll go another year with no disabled kids in their school, and if they keep it up, they’ll never have to have any there. That’s one way to keep from having to deal with things.

Cut to last Monday. We’ve come up with an alternative plan for Jules, which involves having one of the camp counselors from this summer, who we loved, care for him through lunch, after which my wife (who isn’t working this year) would mostly take over. Among other things this would mean that Jules would never be playing by himself while his peers did some kind of activity. But Jules is still in school, because we’ve decided to give things another few days, and the principal has still not managed to call the city office.

At 10:30 am we get a call. Jules has thrown up. Can we come get him?

When my wife picks him up, the teacher makes sure to mention to her that he won’t be allowed to come back on Tuesday, because of the 24-hour rule. When we meet at home a few hours later the decision is easy enough to make. (Jules by the way does not throw up again, and seems totally fine, all day Monday and Tuesday.) It feels to us now like the teachers are looking for reasons to get him out of their hair; it’s the equivalent, we think, of a work slowdown. (In the US, a kid throwing up does not equal an instant trip home. This is probably a cultural difference but in context it was hard to read it that way). So we go to the principal and tell her we’re pulling him out.

The lowlights of that conversation are two: the first in which she says, “I’ll agree to this, but you have to agree that you’re not angry or upset with the school,” to which we spinelessly nod. And the second in which she says, “I wish we could have done more, but you know, this is a school with an ‘academic’ focus…” and drifts off, leaving us to understand that Jules and “academic focus” are an incompatible pair.

Jules seems ok with the new arrangement, so that’s something. And he’s learned some words in German from his classmates, which is pretty cute (mainly Nein, Nee, and Ich auch). But we are really really angry. This anger is, as you might expect, attaching itself most immediately to the teachers and the principal, who now when they see me seem (but perhaps I’m projecting?) to be extra friendly in order to ask me to forgive them for something they think they did. I’m sure that they sometimes feel annoyed that they feel guilty, and make things better for themselves by blaming us for foisting this kid on them. (I imagine that because it’s what I’ve done; it’s what we all do). And of course there’s no real point in being angry at them, since they’re products of a system that has let them teach for however long without having to deal with disabled kids–or, given the entire system–with any difficult differences at all. Teaching is a pretty easy job, in my experience, when you only have to teach the kids who behave in the ways that are convenient for you.

Anyway. It’s been a week, and I’m less mad now that I was, which is why I’m writing this. But I have thought that this is how academics who don’t start out in disability studies, like my friends Janet and Michael, end up there. Because if you’re white, privileged, heterosexual, and a citizen of the country you live in, very little confronts you with the power of the state or of culture these days. Or rather, very little confronts you personally; you get confronted all the time with images and news of violence done to others at home and abroad (the poor, the unemployed, the accidental but entirely predictable victims of “collateral damage”), but little of it happens right in your home. And that’s how you end up, I’m guessing, feeling like you have to something to say about disability.

The point has to be this: citizens must have rights as citizens in relation to their actual being and not to an ideal. This means that children must have rights as they are–that their rights cannot and should not be contingent on their behaving exactly like adults. (You may have heard someone once say, “I’m ok with children in restaurants, as long as they behave themselves.” No, you’re not ok with children in restaurants. You’re ok with adults in restaurants, no matter what age they are.) The same goes for disabled people. It cannot be that only the able-bodied have the right to be in school, lest the disabilities of some “disrupt” the educational experience of others–or make the lives of teachers harder. You have to teach the kids as they are. If, instead, you send away all the difficult ones, the slow ones, the problem cases, the kids whose parents didn’t, or couldn’t, fight for them or make them do their homework–just as the German school system did for years, splitting children up at age 10 (age 10!!) into three tracks leading respectively to blue-collar jobs, low-level white-collar jobs, and the university)–then what you are producing is a “citizenry” that has been purged of its various undesirable elements, and therefore denying the rights of full participation in society to anyone so excluded. That is true even when you place those folks in whatever variety of “special” schools you can imagine, from institutions for the disabled to juvenile detention centers to the Hauptschule, which occupy the lowest rung of the class and educational ladder and send their graduates to vocational schools.

That this makes teaching harder, or running schools harder is, to my mind, tough shit. You either have an inclusive society or you don’t. And if you don’t, or don’t want to, I suppose it’d be nicer if you could at least be honest about it, to yourselves and others, instead of asking the folks disadvantaged by that system to pretend it’s all ok.

Nothing’s new about that pretense. It’s the face of all pretense, all violence that wraps itself in sweet justification. Otherwise how could the perpetrators of such a system live with themselves? No one thinks they’re ignorant, or venal, or evil. Nonetheless some of us are; all of us, probably, at one point or another–certainly structurally if nothing else.

That’s one lesson to be learned here: not only that some teachers and principals in Germany have convinced themselves that they’re doing good while doing bad, but that we all do it; in that sense this scene is not a window but a mirror. But the other lesson is that not everyone’s doing bad in the same way, and that, when we see it, we have to call it out for what it is, say what it is, and try to talk to others about it. Not because it righteousness feels good (though, of course, honestly, it does) but because we need better teachers, and better parents–ones who fight for kids, who take what kids give them, and who teach the students in their class–all the students–how to live and act in a social sphere that includes, minimally, all the human beings who have come to be there, through no fault of their own.

So a group of people at the University of Pittsburgh (including the excellent Gayle Rogers) is reading On Literary Worlds, and they sent a few questions. I’ve pasted my (slightly cleaned up) responses and their questions below.

EH: Thanks to you (and to the group) for these questions. Honestly some part of me feels like they’re above my pay grade. By that I mean that the philosophical coherence of the book may not go as far “down” as the first two of your questions imply. But let me try to say something that may be useful; you could also tell the group that I may not be the best final arbiter of everything I have written, and that in some respects these questions have taught me things I didn’t already know about what the book does. (Later: this is always true; a lesson I learned from Spivak’s final remarks in the introduction to her translation of Derrida’s Of Grammatology.)

Gayle Rogers: The biggest thing we grappled with was trying to come up with how you’re approaching epistemology. A colleague framed it as a split between representational and phenomenological epistemologies of which you were siding with the latter; I thought the former, if you were taking sides in that dichotomy at all. So I’ll leave it open-ended: what claims about epistemology (of aesthetic worlds, specifically) do you need to make, to your mind, if any?

EH: I suppose my argument is this: human cultures grapple with the problem of how to relate to and describe the wholeness of things. I feel like this is a phenomenological problem—that is, that the encounter with “everythingness” is an encounter with the limits, first, of the social, and second, of the natural world; these are both in some strong sense “out there” to be encountered as phenomena. Once that happens, though, things become more representational; that is, the phenomenon acquires a cultural force that minimally interacts with (and on some occasions exceeds) the force of whatever bald phenomenological scene might have inspired it. We all come into a world full of worlds. Most of us don’t give the problem any more thought. And in many cases the history of world-ideas is simply driven by the succession of representational demands, which obeys its own structure and logic. In some other cases it may result from a serious philosophical attempt to reencounter the phenomenological problem (Descartes, Kant, Foucault, etc.); at those moments then a world-idea becomes known at the intersection of the phenomenological (which we only ever encounter in history) and a very long history of world-ideas that have themselves emerged in the crossings, hybridizations, and divagations of earlier phenomenological and representational encounters with the world (going back to the very first one, which never “happened” and is thus outside history). In a third case, perhaps the most interesting one, the rethinking of the world-idea comes from a new apprehension or revision of the phenomenological “facts”—as when, for instance, the God of the neighboring peoples is revealed to be more powerful than your God, or, more recently, as when we confirm with sensory evidence that the Earth is round (and start making globes, etc.), or see the Earth for the first time from space. And then there’s the fourth case: in which these encounters are not so much thought and expressed directly as they are enacted or put into play in the work of art. This being put into play can be quite obviously metadiscursive, as in SF or utopian fiction; but it can also be purely (or almost purely) a matter of the philosophical “background” (the “background” that is the relation between foreground and background, e.g.) to a story or a picture that has nothing to do, finally, with worldedness at all. It is in this latter case that worldedness functions as the preconscious or unconscious of the work.

Course description:Every idea of the modern includes a concept of the primitive. Primitive humans, we are told, inhabited a world without self-consciousness: in daily life, no gap between action and belief (Mircea Eliade); in aesthetics, no “representation,” only presentation (Heidegger); and in history, no fracture between the event and its possibility (Hegel). This course ranges across many of the central theorizations of modernity in order to ask questions about the nature of our contemporary self-understanding as moderns. We will begin with six weeks on modernity, before turning to the nexus of primitivity, animality, and metaphor. The last two weeks will be focused on the history of debates over metaphor and cosmology in Chinese writing, which will serve us as an extended case study. Because the concept of modernity lies at the heart of contemporary understandings of global history, the course is designed to serve as a theoretical background for the general problem of the transcultural as a concept, to ask how such a concept has been modified by—but perhaps also includes in advance—theories of history, of truth, and of self-consciousness.

Work and grading:I will be asking you for roughly 6000 words of written work during the course. These words will be divided as follows:

Three micro-presentations (600 words each), to be made in class. We will discuss these on the first day, as they will begin next week.

1200 words of in-class writing (ungraded), the first 300 of which will happen on the first day of class.

One 3000-word paper to be written at the end of the course.

For the presentations and the final paper, I would prefer if you submitted your work to me in Garamond or Times New Roman, double-spaced, so that I can comment on things as necessary.

Equal access:
I encourage qualified people with disabilities to participate in this class, and am committed to the policy that all people shall have equal access to the course without regard to personal characteristics not related to ability, performance, or qualifications. If you anticipate needing any type of accommodation in this course or have questions about physical access, please tell me immediately, so that I can work to make your participation possible.

Daily syllabus. Have everything read before class. If you are short on time read the documents in the order listed.

Oct 15 Introductions

WHAT IS MODERNITY?

Oct 22
Max Weber, from The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of CapitalismKarl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach”
Peter Hamilton, “The Enlightenment and the Birth of Social Science”

Siobhan Phillips has a long review of On Literary Worldsup at the LA Review of Books. The first paragraph made my heart quake a bit, but it gets easier to bear (if you’re me) from there on, and in the long run I think takes on most of the big ideas in a generous and really smart way.

Some people think MOOCs are bad, some people think they’re good (though I know almost none of the latter). But what you really need to know is: what’s going to happen to the university in the next twenty years as a result of innovations in content delivery?

Luckily for you I have had a vision of the future. I don’t like some of it, but I think it’s accurate. If I were a dean or a university or college president I would be thinking about what I could do right now to respond to the changes that are coming. And if you teach in a university, or attend one, or plan on having friends or children who do, then you need to know what’s coming, because it will affect (and indeed transform) the entire institutional structure of higher education in the United States (and probably worldwide). I’ve put it all in an eay-to-read Q&A format, so no excuses for not following along.

As a bonus at the end I’ll tell you what’s happening to public education at the K-12 level, and offer some suggestions on how to keep the most disastrous vision of the future from coming true.